Collating and binding systems for producing books of signatures are well-known in the prior art. A book of signatures, as conventionally defined in the art, is any collection or grouping of one or more signatures. More commonly, books or collections of signatures are referred to by the general public as magazines, catalogs, periodicals, directories, etc.
There is an increasing desire in the signature printing art to be able to mail books of signatures containing customized information to subscribers. Subscribers of various types of journals, periodicals, catalogs, directories, books, pamphlets, etc., represent different markets as they live in different geographical areas and have different wants and needs. Therefore, certain information is more relevant to some than to others. Those in the printing industry face the problem of providing this customized information in an efficient and accurate manner.
Methods and apparatus for producing books or collections of signatures containing customized information are known in the signature printing art. However, it is difficult to assure that the customized information printed on the inside pages of the books of signatures corresponds to the subscriber mailing label information printed on the cover pages of the books of signatures.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,121,818 (Reilly et al.) is representative of a system for producing books of signatures containing customized information. In Reilly et al., a dot-matrix printer is positioned adjacent a conveyor intermediate of the feeders which feed signatures onto the conveyor progressively building books of signatures. A computerized control system determines the customized information to be printed on the signatures and controls the printing of signatures by the dot-matrix printer. A caliper device located downstream of the dot-matrix printer determines whether or not any pages are missing from a book of signatures. A second dot-matrix printer, located downstream of the first signature printer and of the caliper, prints mailing labels on the books of signatures under control of the computerized control system.
The Reilly et al. signature printing system has several undesirable features. Books of signatures found by the caliper device to have pages missing are reprinted. This causes excessive printing of pages as the faulty books have already had customized information printed in them. In addition, since the rejection of faulty books occurs after the printing of customized information and before the printing of mailing label information, the computerized control system must maintain a rather complicated indexing and information correlation scheme in order to assure that the mailing label printed on a book of signatures at the second printer station corresponds to the customized information printed in that book of signatures at the first printer station.
In Reilly et al. the signature printers are capable of only printing on the outside pages of the signatures as they straddle the conveyor and not on the centerfold pages, which necessitates the dot-matrix printer being located intermediate of the feeder devices when it is desired to print customized information on the inside page of a book of signatures. If multiple pages of customized information in a book of signatures are to be printed, the Reilly et al. system requires that multiple printing stations be established along the conveyor line intermediate of the feeders so that multiple outside pages of signatures can be printed.
The Reilly et al. system also does not appear to make allowance for loss of books of signatures through causes other than missing pages. Thus, it is possible that missing books due to some other cause might go undetected and undelivered to their subscribers.